The future of office work: Difference between revisions

{{freeessay|work|working from home|{{image|sheeple|jpg|''Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeple? {{vsr|1959}}}}}}COVID’s aftermath will reverberate long after the last “keep your goddamn distance” notice has disappeared from the [[public domain]]. The sudden dislocation was its own [[Burgess Shale]]: it punctured a long equilibrium giving us a unique chance to see what would, and could happen in a time of sudden worldwide ''change''.  

Mark it well: as seismic changes do, COVID came out of a clear blue sky. Not one [[change manager]] had been pre-alerted. No opco decks were presented. No [[business continuity plan]]s invoked. Yet, in businesses great and small around the world, unprecedented change went through, overnight, with barely a hitch.  

(It rather begs the question what good all those [[change manager]]s and [[BCM]] programmes do, but that is another story.)

In any case, never — not even in a time of war — has even ''one'' nation’s citizenry been put in indefinite quarantine for months on end, let alone ''all'' of them. And — it was mostly okay, right?<ref>Of course, a deadly pandemic wasn’t ''okay'', but, all told, it could have been a great deal worse.</ref> We learned some new things: working from home is pretty cool! [[Pyjamas]]! Zoom! Kids rushing in at embarrassing moments!  

As COVID receded, [[Thought leader|thought-leaders]] took to [[LinkedIn]] and [[Twitter]] to grapple with ''What It All Means For The Future Of Work''.  

They fell broadly into two camps: ''everything,'' and ''nothing''.

===== This time is different =====

The first said, “[[This time it’s different|this time is different]]”.   

You can’t unsee it: flexible working is now a fact of commercial life.  

With a twist: [[The Man]] teetered for a while between “I’m not having these good-for-naught [[Meatware|meatsack]]s in their goddamn pyjamas on ''my'' dime”, and the more squirrelly “hold on: if these clowns work at home on their own PCs we can nix half the downtown footprint and slash our [[IT]] bill so let’s not rush this”.  

 

Sometimes the two impulses merged and compromised: businesses ditched half their office space ''and'' ordered everyone back to work.  

The debate chuntered on, recently coagulating around poor “TikTok Girl”, a tearful grad confiding to her social media channel the exhausting experience of having to commute, work an eight-hour day and then commute home again.  

Scanlon’s argument was along the following lines: back in the day, agrarian societies worked only daylight hours, giving up their circadian rhythms only when forced to by the industrial revolution. It took Henry Ford — not your ''classic'' Gen Z pin-up, but hey — to realise he would get more out of his workers if he paid them properly and gave them time off. So was born, apparently, the nine-to-five: visionary then, but that was a hundred years ago. ''[[This time it’s different|Things have since changed]].'' The nature of how we now ''are'' — networked, digital and [[onworld|online]] — and what we now ''do'' — delivering services like “B2B [[Software-as-a-service|SaaS]]” instead of making goods in factories — means [[this time it’s different|it’s different this time]].  

Let’s take Scanlon’s potted history as read and park our questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked a regular agrarian day out in the fields, or ''who'' still uses the eight-hour day, since it definitely isn’t the financial services industry or its professional advisors<ref>The EU got so worked up about the long hours that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to ''forty-eight''. Professionals have habitually opted out of it ever since.</ref> — but as we do, dispense a bit of tough parental love: an eight-hour day in an office downtown, even with a commute each side of it is, across the epochal sweep of human perseverance, ''no great imposition''. It might be ''dull'', sure, but that is not the question. You can’t cure boredom by working in your jim-jams from the kitchen table.

(By the way, TikTok Girl herself only really complains about the commute, not the working day in between. Perhaps against her wishes she has become a lightning rod for a bigger question.)

So, have things really changed? Since many businesses now deliver services rather than making things in a factory, jobs ''can'' be delivered remotely.